We couldn’t make unique constraints work in RavenDB 4.0 in a way that made sense for distributed operations, there were just too many hurdles at that level of abstractions. The problem, in essence, boils down to having to do an atomic operation in a distributed environment. When we need to do this in an multi threaded environment, we can rely on interlocked operations to help us. In the same manner, RavenDB offers the notion of interlocked distributed operations.

Let us take a look at how this looks like, shall we?

The output of this code would be:

Success: True, Val: users/1, Index: 13

In other words, we were able to atomically set the value of “ayende” to “users/1”. At the most basic level, this gives us the ability to create unique constraints, because we are able to reserve values for particular documents, and it gives us a much more explicit manner in which to do so. If a user wants to change their username, we first try to grab the new name, change the username and then release the old username. And we have the ability to recover if there are errors midway.

This design is modeled after the Interlocked operations, and is meant to be used in the same manner. You submit such an operation to the cluster, which will run this through the Raft state machine. This means that you can rely on RavenDB’s own distributed state machine to get reliable distributed operations, including the full consistency that this provides. The key arguments here is that the name of the value and the index used. If the index you provide match the index on the state machine, we’ll replace the value in an atomic fashion. Otherwise, the operation will fail and you’ll get the current value and index so you can decide if you want to try again.

The example with the unique constraints is just the tip of the iceberg. You can also use this for your own use for things like distributed locking by registering an owner for a particular lock key and ensuring that everyone who needs the lock will race to acquire it. Note that the value that we use here can be anything, including complex objects. In other words, you can do things like set a lock descriptor that would include timeout information, owner, etc.

The interface here is pretty small, in addition to PutCompareExchangeValueOperation there is also just GetCompareExchangeValueOperation, but it is enough for you to be able to lean on RavenDB’s distributed state machine in your own application.